Serpent OS to Offer Day One Support for Pinebook Pro, Ship with KDE Plasma

Ex-Solus leader Ikey Doherty is developing Serpent OS, supporting 64-bit and ARM64 architectures, with a full-featured KDE Plasma desktop environment.

I recently had a conversation with Ikey Doherty, the ex-Solus leader who is currently working on the new Serpent OS distribution. It's been two months since I first announced that Ikey Doherty is working on Serpent Linux, and it seems like progress is being made.

There are some exciting new features coming to Serpent OS that I think many of you will be interested in. One of the most intriguing aspects is that it will support both 64-bit (x86_64) and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures from the beginning. This means it will cater to both Intel (Haswell and later) and AMD (Zen and later) computers, as well as the Rockchip RK3399 SoC that powers PINE64's Pinebook Pro and the Raspberry Pi 4 boards.

The popularity of the Pinebook Pro and the Raspberry Pi makes Serpent OS an attractive option for those looking for a cheap and high-performing Linux computer. Additionally, the inclusion of a full-featured KDE Plasma desktop environment and a brand-new package manager written in the D programming language adds to the appeal of Serpent OS.

It's worth noting that the initial pre-release builds will ship with Sway, a tiling window manager and Wayland compositor, as Serpent OS aims to be a Wayland-only distro. Ikey Doherty also mentioned that a bootable barebones image should be available by the end of September 2020, with prototype ISOs to follow.

Overall, it looks like Serpent OS is shaping up to be a promising new distribution with a focus on performance, versatility, and innovation. I'm excited to see how it develops and what it has to offer in the future.